Introducing Hannah to his mother on the second date was an abject failure. And he was almost five days into the two weeks allotted for completing his article. So far, he’d given her a mind-blowing dinner—and his best oral sex performance—and made his mother fall in love with her. He was as bad at losing a girl—during the first few weeks of a romance—as Chris and Joey were at keeping a lady interested. But they were also quitters, unlike him. He would turn himself into a human red flag tonight, come hell or high water.
So, he’d have to move on to Plan B, who was currently circulating among guests and pouring champagne. He caught her eye and winked. After hesitating for a moment to fight his instinct to tell Hannah he’d be right back, he walked toward Plan B.
* * *
—
ARTIE GRABBED THE FAT on the back of Hannah’s arm and squeezed. That was just plain rude. “What?”
“Your man.” She nodded toward their left. “He is flirting with another woman.”
“He’s not my man.” Hannah’s gaze followed her friend’s. Sure enough, Jack was holding a drink and close-talking a waitress. “He’s probably just being friendly.”
They watched for a few moments, and the server threw her head back in a fit of audacious laughter and put her hand inside his jacket as though she was about to stroke his left moob.
Hannah gasped, and a spark of anger made the champagne turn over in her stomach. She was the only one who currently got to grab either of his moobs, and that was the way it would stay for the next two weeks.
Artie made a little grunt that conveyed her lack of approval. Hannah wanted to do a whole lot more—like run over there and bust her empty champagne flute over that woman’s head. She’d always prided herself on not being the jealous type—it wasn’t very enlightened—but something about Jack made her want to bust a cap in the ass of any woman who touched him like that. This wasn’t even rational. Jack wasn’t her real boyfriend, and she wouldn’t have the right to get jealous over him, even if he was. This was a second date.
She was in the midst of chanting This is fake. This is fake. This is all fake, in her head when Jack’s mother noticed that they were no longer paying attention to her story about the sculptor she’d slept with while doing her thesis project in Spain. She looked over her shoulder to where Jack was still letting that woman touch him and snorted.
“You don’t have to worry about her.”
“I’m not worried.” Hannah’s attention snapped back to Molly. “Who’s worried?”
Molly motioned toward Hannah’s face with one slim finger. “You’re bright red, dear.”
Shit. “We’ve only just started dating.” Molly raised one brow, and Artie started looking for more drinks or for people with less family drama to talk to. “He can do whatever he wants.”
Jack’s mom shrugged. “My point is that there’s no point in being angry—”
“Can we just pretend we never saw this?” Hannah asked. “Can we maybe pretend that this portion of the conversation never happened?”
“I’m not going to tell him anything, Hannah.” Molly held up one hand, and Artie—godsend that she was—replaced her empty champagne with a full one. “My point is that you don’t have to be angry, because she’s not into Jack.”
“How do you know that?” Any woman who was stroking Jack underneath his clothes, in a public place, while she was working, was into him. “It certainly looks—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Molly shook her head and finished her drink in one gulp. “That’s Darcy McGinnis; she grew up on our block. She also came out years ago. They dated in kindergarten, but then it was most definitely over.”
“Well, what’s going on, then?”
“My son is being a man—an idiot man.”
“Aah.” Apparently, Artie knew what was going on, but Hannah was still woefully in the dark.
“What the heck is going on?” Hannah had been this close to avoiding cursing in front of Jack’s mother until now.
“He’s trying to make you jealous.”
Hannah was about to argue, but she guessed that was the only thing that made sense. Except it didn’t make sense at all. Why would Jack be trying to make her jealous on their second date?
“Why would he do that?” she asked, not necessarily expecting an answer.
“He’s a man.” Artie had turned into a parrot of Molly, and nothing was any clearer. She looked down at her half-full glass, wondering if maybe she’d had too much champagne. But too much champagne wasn’t actually a thing in her world.
“You have to nip this in”—Artie appeared to search for words—“the bud.” She was getting much better at her American idioms.
“I’m not going to say anything about it.” What could she say about it? If Jack were any other guy, she’d shrug it off and move the hell on. Alone.
But if she even mentioned his talking to another woman, he would think she was absolutely nuts. They were on a second date. They weren’t exclusive, and she hadn’t even given him an orgasm yet. She had no right to be jealous, even if he was trying to elicit some sort of response from her.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of saying anything. It was too bad that he’d ruined the evening.
Unexpectedly, she’d liked meeting his mother. She enjoyed feeling like she could fit with people in Jack’s family. Molly was lovely, and her first thought on meeting her was that she was the explanation for why Jack was such a lovely man. She was elegant and feminist and crazy-funny.
But she couldn’t do that. She would have to grin and bear any stupid man behavior that he dished out for the next eleven days.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SEAN NOLAN DIDN’T RAISE children who gave up. The worst thing one of them could do as a kid was to show up after failing at something without a plan of action for starting over again. It was just about the only thing that could get Jack grounded as a teenager. If he wasn’t going to win, he had to try his best.
Jack struggled not to let down the Nolan family name as he sat at his desk staring at a blank page, wondering what to write about his night at the museum. Because he had thousands of words to go, he was glad that Hannah hadn’t broken things off after he’d flirted with Darcy for a good hour. But the fact that she hadn’t even mentioned his outrageously uncomfortable tête-à-tête with Darcy at the museum on the way home irked him. He thought for sure that Hannah was the kind of woman who would call him out for flirting with someone else in front of her, but for the whole ride to her place she hadn’t said a word about that or how strange it was to introduce her to his mother on a second date.